Ronnie Le Drew, puppeteer behind the obnoxious Zippy in Rainbow and Sooty’s pal Sweep

Telegraph ObituariesFri, July 31, 2026 at 2:16 PM UTC

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Ronnie Le Drew with Zippy: he was also the pointing finger in the National Lottery commercials - Tom Dymond/Channel 4/Shutterstock

Ronnie Le Drew, the puppeteer, who has died aged 78, gave life to Zippy, the rebarbative braggart with a rugby-ball shaped head and zip-up mouth who dominated the children’s television series Rainbow.

A goggle-eyed orange creature of no recognisable species, Zippy was the offensive, attention-seeking member of the Rainbow household, which also included a camp pink hippopotamus called George, and Bungle, an ingenuous bear.

Geoffrey Hayes, the presenter, fruitlessly tried to keep his puppet housemates in order, while his fellow humans Rod, Jane and Freddy provided musical interludes (often eliciting comments from Zippy such as: “What’s that terrible noise?”). Zippy’s chaotic behaviour delighted the programme’s young viewers, although some parents longed for the inevitable moment when he would go too far and his mouth be zipped up as punishment.

Made for Thames Television at Teddington Studios, Rainbow began its long run in 1972 as a British alternative to the popular American import Sesame Street. Zippy was created by the veteran puppeteer Violet Philpott, but the high turnover of Rainbow episodes led to her damaging her back as she manipulated the Zippy puppet.

Geoffrey Hayes reading a bedtime story to Bungle, George and Zippy on Rainbow

Ronnie Le Drew took over in 1974, remaining until the series was axed 18 years later. He noted that although the programme’s educational remit was emphasised in its early years, it gradually became more knockabout and Zippy became naughtier.

The actor Roy Skelton provided Zippy’s rasping nasal voice (as well as George’s more emollient snuffle) from a booth in the studio, and he and Le Drew came to regard themselves as a double-act, with Skelton instantly able to modulate his performance in response to the movements provided by Le Drew, and vice versa. When Skelton left towards the end of the run, Le Drew seamlessly took over the voice too: “It was ingrained in my head.”

After Rainbow came to an end Le Drew continued to operate and voice Zippy for various revivals, spin-offs, commercials and guest appearances on series such as Celebrity Juice and The Last Leg. In 2002 George and Zippy’s novelty single It’s a Rainbow charted at No 15 and they performed it on Top of the Pops.

Le Drew and Zippy also toured clubs and student unions; initially Zippy would indulge in bad language and innuendo, but soon had to clean up his act. “The audience didn’t like it,” Le Drew observed. “They’d come to see the Rainbow they remembered.”

Nevertheless, a double-entendre-heavy mini-episode of Rainbow that the cast had recorded as a private skit, in which Zippy boasts about having a big red twanger as Rod, Jane and Freddy bring out their guitars, has been watched 5.5 million times on YouTube.

Unlike Geoffrey Hayes, who became a minicab driver and shelf stacker after Rainbow ended, Le Drew was never short of work, Rainbow having been only one facet of his career as one of Britain’s foremost puppeteers.

He often worked with the Jim Henson Company, operating puppets on films such as Labyrinth, The Muppet Christmas Carol and Little Shop of Horrors: he was particularly proud of a scene in the latter in which he contrived to have the giant man-eating plant Audrey II using a dial telephone with one of its tendrils.

With Muffin the Mule - Alamy

It was a tribute to Le Drew’s digital dexterity that he was chosen to model for the giant hand emerging from the sky and pointing at National Lottery winners – while a voice intoned “It’s you!” – in a long-running series of commercials made by Camelot. Le Drew was paid a mere £50 for half an hour’s work, but insisted he was pleased to “have the most famous hand in the country”.

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Ronald Frederick Le Drew was born to Canadian parents in Toronto on October 23 1947. His father, Leslie, was a teacher and an Anglophile who prevailed on his wife Edna, née Brooker, to emigrate to London when Ronnie and his twin sister were three.

The family lived in a council flat in Stockwell, and, after his father gave him some glove puppets when he was nine, Ronnie sought refuge from his parents’ rather fractious marriage by putting on shows. To the accompaniment of a wind-up gramophone, he would entertain large groups of children sitting on the concrete steps in his block of flats.

On one occasion he attempted something more ambitious than his usual comic fare – a puppet version of Hamlet. Peeping round the curtain to see how it was being received, he found that everybody had left: for the rest of his career he took care to prioritise what audiences wanted.

At Stockwell Manor Comprehensive School, Ronnie was bullied for being “a bit weedy” and nicknamed “Le Drew-drop”. He sought refuge in puppeteering, and at 15 went to see a performance of The Little Mermaid at the Little Angel Theatre, a newly founded puppet theatre in Islington.

Transfixed, he “literally banged on the door and asked how you became a puppeteer,” and was taken on as an unpaid apprentice by the theatre’s founders, John and Lyndie Wright. Although his parents were rebuked by his headmaster – “Your son is leaving school for what I would assume is a hobby rather than a job” – they agreed to support him. When his father died suddenly shortly afterwards, John Wright consented to pay him two pounds a week.

“I was sweeping floors and making tea, but eventually got to operate the puppets,” Le Drew recalled. He toured Europe, Israel and the United States with the company, and continued to work at the Little Angel Theatre as a puppeteer, director and teacher for the rest of his life; he won particular acclaim for his puppet adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.

Le Drew’s other projects included playing Polynesia the parrot (with the voice provided by Julie Andrews) in a tour of the musical Doctor Dolittle, and being the hand inside Sweep the dog in The Sooty Show. In 2015 he worked as a puppeteer on the fantasy film Pan, directed by Joe Wright, the son of his mentors John and Lyndie Wright.

Ronnie Le Drew in 2024 - See Li/Picture Capital/Alamy

Recently he worked on the films Pinocchio, doubling for Tom Hanks as Gepetto in the scenes in which he operates puppets, and Beauty and the Beast. In 2022 he performed in a marionette version of Cinderella at the Norwich Puppet Theatre.

His live shows often involved audience participation, with attendees encouraged to take off their socks and fashion them into glove puppets for a sock-singalong.

Ronnie Le Drew was president of the British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild from 2016, and in 2019 published an autobiography, Zippy and Me.

“One of the reasons I enjoy being a puppeteer – I walk down the street, nobody really knows me,” he observed. “I like not being the star or being a face on television, I prefer to be the characters.”

He married, in 1983, Caroline Astell-Burt, with whom he ran the London School of Puppetry for a time. They were separated, and he is survived by their son and daughter.

Ronnie Le Drew, born October 23 1947, died July 27 2026

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